I am a father of three small ones in Austria. The Tonies are cute, but I find them just so frivolously expensive!
My children loved to listen on audio books on CDs (can be rented from libraries or bought for cheap) or on an old 1st gen iPod.
My children loved to listen on audio books on CDs (can be rented from libraries or bought for cheap) or on an old 1st gen iPod.
They licence the songs and then record them in-house and goodness me some of them are disappointing if you are familiar with the real soundtracks. The Moana one has the same two singers doing impressions of every character.
You might want to check out https://www.hoerbert.com. This is a remarkably well-built, low-tech alternative. It is somewhat primitive, but the company seems willing to indulge customers who are technically inclined.
As an adjacent thought on the Hörbert device:
Since we live very far away from family (transatlantic flight), we decided to have our relatives record themselves reading books for our kids. They shared the audio files over Google Drive, and we could load up the audio files onto the Hörbert device so that our kids could listen to their custom audio books whenever they wanted. It provided a nice way to help the kids feel connected with the grandparents and such. With the Hörbert, all that involved was ejecting the SDK card and amending its contents on a normal computer.
The original box itself was way more expensive than the Toniebox, like double the price, but I think they've made it considerably cheaper when they released the second hardware version of it. And the original box still works until today, continues to be supported by their app and has already been built in a very sturdy way (I've opened it up once to add magnets inside, so the figurines stick on it, which they normally don't do - that's the one thing the Toniebox people got right).
Which is a bummer, as I went looking after your comment - Toniebox is great but I agree it feels overpriced on the content side (perhaps it isn’t, if their competitor couldn’t make the business model work…)
https://old.reddit.com/r/jooki/comments/1eltdcm/muuselabs_ha...
I might build this with my children together.
Also what helps: resale value is great, so after the Tonies have had their time and your kids become older... just sell them off.